The Curse of the Wendigo

THIRTEEN

“The Real Danger”

We awoke to a world of dazzling white. The clouds that had lingered for untold days were torn away by the relentless wind, and dawn arrived on the wings of a sapphire sky. Our few fitful hours of rest had done little to relieve our exhaustion; we stumbled from the tent and surveyed this new world with dead expressions, like scarecrows contemplating the immense autumnal firmament.

Warthrop pointed off to his left. “Do you know what that is, Will Henry?” he asked in a raw voice.

I squinted along the line of his finger. “What?”

“Unless I am very much mistaken, that is what men call the sun. Which rises in the east, Will Henry, which means that way is west, that north, and that south!”

He clapped his hands. The sound was very loud in the sanctuary stillness of the forest.

“Here we go! It’s much colder, but much brighter, isn’t it? We’ll make good time now, and no going in circles this day! Snap to and let’s pack up, Will Henry.” He noticed my staring at him. “What is it? What’s the matter? Don’t you see? We’re going to make it!”

“We’re still lost,” I pointed out.

“No, we are not,” he insisted. “We’ve merely misplaced ourselves!” He forced himself to laugh—a ludicrous mimic of a laugh. “I don’t see you smiling. It is so rare that I attempt witticism, Will Henry—smiling might encourage it.”

“I don’t want to encourage it,” I replied. I kneeled to pull a stake from the ground.

“I see. You’re still smarting from last night. You know I don’t really mean those things I said. I have always attested to your usefulness, Will Henry. You have ever been indispensable to me.”

“It’s what I live for, sir.”

“Now you are being facetious.”

I shook my head. I was sincere.

It was not the carefree stroll the monstrumologist had envisioned. The snow was piled five feet deep in places, drifts as high as my head, into which I would drop to my waist, and I’d be forced to wait helplessly for the doctor to set down Chanler and pull me out. We stopped at midday, shoveling handfuls of snow into our parched mouths, and I endured twenty minutes of Warthrop whining on about snowshoes, wondering if, without doing anything about it, we might be able to fashion some from sticks. The sunlight hardly alleviated the cold; the deep snow made every step more a matter of willpower than strength. We were headed in the right direction, but could still have been scores of miles from civilization. I stopped caring. By midafternoon an enormous lethargy overwhelmed me. All I wanted to do was curl up and go to sleep. I even stopped feeling cold. Indeed, I began to sweat beneath my layers.

I was considering pulling off my heavy wool overcoat when Warthrop called to me, “Look over there, Will Henry.”

Several black specks floated high over the treetops, rotating majestically on the updrafts. Buteos, Sergeant Hawk had called them.

“Snap to now!” said the doctor, making straight for them. “Where there are scavengers, there is carrion, Will Henry, or soon-to-be carrion! We may dine like kings tonight if we hurry!”

And hurry we did, pushing our way through the stubborn snow, our protesting muscles fighting against the creepers and scrub that lay buried beneath the snowpack. We were out of breath and near the end of all endurance when we reached the spot over which the scavengers patrolled—a towering white pine, upon whose upper branches several of their fellows perched, as serene as church deacons clustered about their afternoon repast.

Their meal hung tangled in the uppermost branches. His arms were outstretched and his legs together, like Christ crucified, and his head rested on one shoulder, the eyeless sockets looking toward the indiscernible horizon. He looked very small from our vantage point forty feet below, no larger than I. He looked like a child who had in fun climbed a tree and gotten stuck near the top, able to climb no higher and too fearful to scamper down.

I could see the shiny brass buttons of his open coat, his shredded shirt fluttering in the high wind, and the ropy snarl of his frozen intestines, glittering in the sunlight. While I watched, a buzzard turned its tonsured head toward the man’s face, cocking it in that curiously obscene gesture of scavengers, and tore the tongue from his open mouth.

We had found our lost guide.

“Can you do it, Will Henry?” the doctor asked.

“I think so, sir.”

“No. Not ‘think so.’ Can you do it?”

I nodded, feigning confidence. “Yes, sir.”

“Good boy.”

I slung the coil of rope over my shoulder and began the arduous climb. The skin of the pine was slick, the branches thick toward the bottom but tapering as I rose.

“Get to one side, Will Henry, not below him. He’s bound to be frozen stiff, so it won’t be easy. . . . Careful there! Watch what you’re doing, boy. That branch is cracked—I can see it from here! Carefully, Will Henry, carefully!”

The wind tugged at my shoulders; it sliced at my cheeks; it sang in my ears. I kept my eyes on my quarry; I did not look down. I paused to rest with my head level with the bottom of his boots, arms aching, with feet too numb to feel the slender branch beneath them.

“Higher, Will Henry,” the monstrumologist called up. “And to the side. He’ll come down right on top of you from there!”

I nodded, though I doubted he could see my assent. Three feet more, and now I was level with the torso. His entire chest cavity had been opened up. Ice crystals glittered like jewels festooning his ribs, lining the walls of his ripped-open stomach; his lungs looked like two enormous multifaceted diamonds; his frozen viscera shone as brightly as wet marble. It was terrible. And it was beautiful.

I climbed higher. With his outstretched arm brushing the top of my head, I looked up into the face of Jonathan Hawk—or what was left of it. How much does our expression rely upon our eyes! Without them, can one tell fear from wonder, joy from sorrow? His nose had been torn off—like his tongue, digesting in the bellies of the birds who had returned to the cloudless sky, with not so much as a protesting squawk at my intrusion. They were patient; the meat wasn’t going anywhere, or if it did, there would be more meat somewhere else. There was always meat.

“No, no, no!” The doctor’s voice floated up to me, puny and feeble in the thin air, competing with the singing wind. “Not around his waist, Will Henry! Throw the loop around his neck!”

With one hand clinging to a branch that bowed dangerously low, I reached up with the rope and dropped the hastily fashioned noose over Sergeant Hawk’s head.

The buteo had not gotten all of his tongue. A sliver the size of my little finger hung over the lower lip, still attached at the root. This the shredded tongue that had sung the words “J’ai fait une mâtresse y a pas longtemps.” These the frozen lungs that had given the words breath. This the icy heart that had given them meaning.

“Will Henry, what the devil are you doing up there? Come down at once. Snap to, Will Henry. Snap to.”

I dropped the rope down to him. Arduously slow was my descent to earth. The sergeant’s was much faster—a hard yank on the rope, and the body dropped, as fixed as a statue, to land faceup with a muffled whump! in the snow. The doctor went to his knees beside the fallen man. He wanted to examine the body before the light failed. He may have been looking for similarities between Hawk’s injuries and those of Pierre Larose. I cannot say for certain, for he did not communicate his intent to me. He may have simply been curious in the professional sense. I’d seen enough, so I did not watch. High in the tree, I had also seen something else, something that was almost as exhilarating to me as a corpse was to a monstrumologist.

I had turned my head to follow Hawk’s “gaze” and had seen it, painted a glimmering gold by the dying sun—a broad lake in the distance and, upon its far shore, Wauzhushk Onigum, the town of Rat Portage.

He had kept his promise, high in the tree that the Haudenosaunee tribe called the Tree of Great Peace. He had shown us the way home.

It was our last night in the wilderness and it was our worst night in the wilderness. The temperature plunged with the sun; it could not have been much higher than zero, and we had no means to make a fire. We piled snow around the tent to help insulate it before crawling inside, though the doctor left me for a while alone with Chanler, whose condition deteriorated with each passing hour. His face had turned the color of ash, and the only signs of life were the tiny explosions of breath condensing in the frigid air. I feared all our hardships had been for naught. I feared John Chanler would not live out the night.

Warthrop had told me to stay with him. That order I disobeyed. The doctor was gone too long. After all, something had killed Pierre Larose and Jonathan Hawk.

I found him standing ankle-deep in the snow, contemplating the staggering profusion of stars, their gift a silvery infusion of light, transforming the forest into a glittering jewel.

“Yes,” he said softly. “What is it?”

“I didn’t know what happened to you, sir.”

“Hmm? Nothing happened to me, Will Henry.”

Sergeant Hawk lay where he had landed, with arms outstretched, as if he had frozen while making a snow angel.

“Except that somewhere along the trail I misplaced my good sense,” the doctor continued. “Why didn’t I think to climb a tree to have a look around?”

“Is that what you think happened?”

“Well, he didn’t fly up there, I’m nearly certain of that.”

“But why didn’t he come down again?”

He shook his head. He pointed at the sky. “See there? Orion, the hunter. Always has been my favorite. . . . Something prevented him, obviously. Perhaps some predator. He ran off without his rifle, the fool. Or perhaps he was afraid of heights, and froze in terror. ‘Froze.’ Well. That’s a poor choice of words.”

“But what could have torn him open like that?”

“Postmortem injuries, Will Henry. From the buzzards.”

I took a moment to think—always the best course when talking with Pellinore Warthrop. He made you pay when you didn’t.

“But he wasn’t holding on to anything. He was facing out, and his arms were out, like this, like he had been . . . hung there.”

“What are you suggesting, Will Henry?”

“I’m not, sir. I was asking. . . .”

“Forgive me. It is quite cold, and sound carries differently in the cold, but I did not hear you ask anything.”

“It’s nothing, sir.”

“I suppose you meant to observe that his position does not fit the premise that he climbed the tree, for whatever purpose. I would argue the observation is irrelevant, since the only way he could have gotten up there is to have climbed. I was right all along. He left our camp looking for the way out—and found it. Just in time for us—and too late for him.

“The more important question is what killed him. The damage from the scavengers makes that question a bit difficult to answer, so for now my guess would be exposure. Sergeant Hawk froze to death.”

I bit my lip. No living man would have turned around like that. None but a madman would have hung himself in such a manner forty feet from the ground. And that observation seemed entirely relevant to me.

That was the night it came for us, for we had offended it. We had taken what it had claimed for itself.

It came for us, the one who came before words, the Nameless One given countless names.

The monstrumologist was the first to hear it. He nudged me awake, and pressed a hand over my mouth. “There is something outside,” he whispered, his lips brushing my ear.

He released me and slid toward the opening of the tent. I saw him crouching a foot away, and I saw the shape of the rifle in his hand. I heard nothing at first, only the far-winding lamentation of the wind high in the trees. Then I heard it, the distinct sound of something large crunching through the frosted snowpack.

It could be a bear, I thought. Or even a moose. It sounded much too large to be a man. I leaned forward, trying to locate the sound’s origin. It seemed close at first, perhaps no farther than a few feet in front of us, and then I thought, No, it is way off in the trees behind us.

The monstrumologist motioned for me to come closer. “It appears our yellowed-eyed friend has returned, Will Henry,” he whispered. “Stay here with John.”

“You’re going out there?” I was appalled.

He was gone before the question was done. I scooted into the spot he’d vacated and watched him ease carefully toward the trees, the outline of his form exquisitely distinct against the pristine snowbound backdrop. Now the only sound was the doctor’s boots, breaking through the thin upper crust of the snow. That and the excited respirations of John Chanler behind me, like a man after a long uphill trek. I squinted into the silvery light, scanning the woods for the yellow eyes. So complete was my concentration, so utterly focused was I upon the task that I thought nothing when Chanler began to mutter in his delirium the same nonsense he’d been droning off and on for days. “Gudsnuth nesht! Gebgung grojpech!” My heart quickened, for the doctor had drifted completely out of sight, leaving me with only the sound of Chanler’s gurgling drivel for company. If he would only be quiet, then perhaps I could at least hear the doctor! I glanced behind me.

He was sitting up, the top half of the old blanket pooled in his lap. His gray flesh, slick with sweat, shone in the semidarkness. The eyes were open—grotesquely oversize in his emaciated face, and bright yellow, the pupils as small as pinpricks—from which dribbled ocherous tears the consistency of curd.

My first instinct, rooted in our recent past—the outcome the last time our eyes had met—was to run, to put as much distance between us as possible, certainly a response the doctor would not have approved of, given the circumstances. What I might have been running toward might have been far worse than what I ran from.

He was panting; I could see the tip of his gray tongue. Spittle ran over the enflamed lower lip and dripped into the sparse whiskers on his chin. By a trick of the insubstantial light, his teeth seemed exceptionally large.

Steady, steady, steady, I told myself. He isn’t a monster. He’s a man. He’s the doctor’s friend.

I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile.

His reaction was instantaneous. With an explosive leap—too fast for the eye to follow—he rocketed into me, his bony shoulder slamming into my chin with the force of a battering ram. I fell back, black stars blooming before my eyes. A hand clamped over my nose and mouth. The other hand ripped my shirtfront, shredding the material with its splintered nails, slicing open the tender skin beneath. The hot breath reeking of decay first, then the scaly, pustulant lips pressing against the flesh directly over my throbbing heart.

Then the teeth.

It is called Atcen . . . Djenu . . . Outiko . . . Vindiko, the monstrumologist had said. It has a dozen names in a dozen lands, and it is older than the hills, Will Henry.

I kicked my legs, and sucked uselessly upon the palm pressed hard against my open mouth. My head lay outside the tent, and my vision was clouded with the numberless stars sparking cold fire, shimmering like the crystalline ice inside the desecrated temple of Jonathan Hawk’s remains. Orion, the hunter. My favorite.

Blood roared in my ears. My chest ached. My heart leapt; it pushed against my ribs, as if anxious for Chanler to ravish it. His mouth worked upon my burning chest; I felt the teeth scouring my corruption, desperate for the pure center.

It feeds, and the more it feeds, the hungrier it becomes. It starves even as it gorges. It is the hunger that cannot be satisfied.

In the ruined sanctuary, the bleating of the sacrificial goat. In the sepulchral silence, the calling of my name.

In its icy grip there is no hope of rescue.

Someone was sobbing; it could not have been me. Chanler wept into the wounds he’ d created. He consumed flesh and tears.

In the deepest of pits, my mother combs out her hair. The light is golden. Her wrists are delicate. I remember the way she smelled.

One by one the stars begin to loose from heaven’s grip; they fall into the golden light where my mother sits.

How could one so frail be so strong? My hands flailed uselessly at my sides. My heels dug feebly in the earth. I could feel myself flowing into him.

I am almost there, Mother. Through him I come to you, borne by the ark of his kiss.

In the blasted wasteland we hold our heads, confounded. We lift our eyeless sockets to the incurious moon. On the high wind rides the voice that calls our name.

The golden light is warm. It rushes into my eyes and fills me, and I am no longer afraid.

The butt of the Winchester smashed into the base of Chanler’s skull. The spindly neck snapped back. Warthrop hit him again with all his force. He dropped the rifle, grabbed him by the shoulders, and hurled him off. Chanler leapt; the doctor met the lunge with his fist, slamming it into the side of his friend’s head. Chanler collapsed across my jerking legs, his face wearing an obscenely painted mask of mucus and blood.

The doctor knelt beside me; his dark eyes replaced the stars in my sight.

“Will Henry?” he murmured.

He bent to examine the wound. I heard him hiss sharply through his teeth.

“Deep, but not too deep,” he muttered. “The real danger is infection.”

“The real danger . . . ,” I echoed weakly.

With a thunderous wallop and a riot of riven canvas and shattered wood entangled with skeins of frozen rope, the tent blew apart, its remains hurtling into the trees, as if driven by a gale. The doctor fell over me—and a shadow fell over us. It blotted out the stars. Its stench engulfed the cosmos. Pale yellow shone its malevolent eye. I looked into that eye, and that eye looked back at me.

I have no memory of the next few moments. There was the yellow eye . . . and then trees, brambles, rotting logs, the perplexities of knotted vine and shallow half-frozen streams, the crackle of breaking snow, the dervish of the maddened stars, as we ran through the forest, I in my weakened state following in the footsteps stamped into the snow by the weight of two men—the doctor and the unconscious John Chanler, whom Warthrop had slung over his shoulder. We abandoned everything—rucksacks, canteens, medical kit—even the rifles. They were useless against the thing that pursued us.

Outiko is not hunted; Outiko hunts, the ogimaa had said. You do not call Outiko. Outiko calls you.

The wind no longer sang high in the trees. It screeched. It keened. It wailed. The ground shook beneath our feet. The forest echoed with a rhythmic pulse, an ear-shattering pounding, the primal beat of Gaia’s heart.

I fell farther and farther behind. I couldn’t see them anymore, just their footprints zigzagging through the primeval morass. Behind me, uprooted trees toppled with snow-muffled thunderclaps, the high-pitched snapping of their boughs pitiful accompaniment to the bawling wind and the teeth-rattling cannonade of the thing’s pursuit. My stride became the stumbling semi-falling of a drunk; I went to my knees. Then up for a few yards, only to fall again. Let it take me, I thought. You can’t outrun it. You can’t hide from it. Kneeling, I covered my head with my hands and waited for the Old One to take me.

“Get up! Get up, Will Henry, get up!”

The monstrumologist hauled me to my feet and shoved me forward.

“You fall again and I’ll kick you there,” he shouted. “Do you understand?”

I nodded—and collapsed anyway. With a howl of rage the doctor yanked me back up, wrapped his free arm around my waist, and pushed forward, Chanler dangling over one shoulder, his recalcitrant ward hanging beneath the other. Thus borne down on one side with the burden he’d chosen and on the other with the one he’d inherited, Pellinore Warthrop carried on through the desolation.